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Monthly Archives: March 2013

Should Ryerson replace Blackboard? If we do, what should we replace it with?

We invite everyone in the Ryerson Community to join us for a series of learning management system (LMS) demonstrations from April 2nd – 9th. We are calling it LMS Demo Week and it is your chance to see how some of the competition stacks up against Blackboard. We have scheduled demonstrations from Desire2Learn, Blackboard (a new upcoming release), OpenClass by Pearson, Canvas by Instructure as well as demonstrations of Sakai and Moodle. The format will be 1 hour of live demonstrations followed by 30 minutes for audience Q&A. The focus is on seeing how each system helps to facilitate learning and teaching.

We have also scheduled special presentations featuring guest faculty and staff who will discuss their experiences using various LMS solutions at their Universities. Whenever possible we plan to record the demonstrations and make them available on this site later.

These events are part of the Learning and Teaching Systems and Services consultation process. For more information on the consultation please visit:

The complete demo week schedule is below. We encourage you to drop in and see as many demos as you’d like, but in order to get a sense of community interest, we would appreciate if you could take a few moments to register for the events you plan to attend:

We plan to stream as many of these events as possible. The current live stream schedule is available here: http://goo.gl/UVK5J

ASL interpreters have been scheduled for all but the last presentation. We are attempting to work around a scheduling problem but cannot promise an ASL interpreter will be available for the last presentation. You will not be able to see the ASL interpreter in the live video. However, recorded video will be captioned and posted on http://ryecast.ryerson.ca.

Please note: the Digital Media Projects office’s Wed. April 3rd walk-in clinic for Blackboard and Google have been cancelled.